With the explosion of coding bootcamps in recent years, it speaks volumes, as demand for coding & software skills continues to outpace supply. What’s more the starting salaries aren’t bad either.

But how will this affect coding bootcamps going forward?

Would you like a helping of beaurocracy?

Part of the ruling was regarding licensed teachers…

“In order to obtain a SED license, a non-degree granting career school must meet a number of criteria, including using an approved curriculum and employing a licensed director and teachers.”

One thing that sets coding bootcamps apart is that they train their own teachers. And they also use their own curricula. And while protecting consumers is certainly a worthwhile goal, the ruling means bootcamps will have to navigate government bureaucracy for approval. Some have pointed out that the process can be slow & full of red tape. Which is sort of counter to the whole agile startup private industry philosophy. We’ll see!

$75k after 3 months?

One of the claims their marketing made was that many students were making $75k after a few months of study. The ruling underscored this as particularly misleading. more here

As anyone who has studied computer science knows, there’s a lot of foundational concepts in logic, mathematics & problem solving, which you don’t develop overnight. Hopefully this ruling with hammer home the idea, that it takes a little bit more time folks!

Does it please the crown?

One of the comments on hacker news asks “Does it please the crown?”. By slapping these guys on the wrist, the barrier to entry will be higher. Going forward, they will have to pass more hurdles & government beaurocracy.

One of the things that sets coding schools apart is that they can train their own teachers & build their own syllabus. We’ll see if these new hurdles slow things down or not.

“…as living in a commune, where much lip service was paid to ideals of peace, love and harmony, had deprived them of normal, socially approved outlets for their control freakdom, it tended to come out in other invariably more sinister ways. Applying this to the case of Apple Computer will be left as an exercise for the reader, and not a very difficult exercise.”

Anyone who has read about Steve Jobs will chuckle at this one.

1. The Hole Hawg of the internet

When Stephenson wrote this it was 1999. Linux adoption was growing at internet startups, where cost was everything, and risks could be taken. Remember this was before the two biggest data center companies even existed, namely Google & Amazon. Without Linux, neither would be here today!

Linux was and is today more like a Hole Hawg for the internet, powerful, but dangerous in the wrong hands. 🙂

“The Hole Hawg is like the genie of the ancient fairy tales, who carries out his masters instructions literally and precisely and with unlimited power, often with disasterous unforseen consequences.”

2. Unix as oral history, our Gilgamesh

“Unix, by contrast is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh. What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again — making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy.”

3. The bizarre Trinity Torvalds, Stallman & Gates

“In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three & Linux would not exist.”

And indeed we must thank all three of these characters for where the internet stands today. The cloud is possible because of Linux & cheap intel hardware. And the GNU free software to go along with it.

4. On the meaning of “Open Source”

“Source files are useless to your computer, and of little interest to most users, but they are of gigantic cultural & political significance, because Microsoft & Apple keep them secret, while Linux makes them public. They are the family Jewels. They are the sort of thing that in Hollywood thrillers is used as a McGuffin: the plutonium bomb core, the top-secret blueprints, the suitcase of bearer bonds, the reel of microfilm.

5. What about Apple today?

“The ideal OS for me would be one that had a well-designed GUI that was easy to set up and use, but that included terminal windows where I could revert to the command line interface and run GNU software when it made sense.”

Stephenson wrote this before Apple has rebuilt their OS to sit on top of Unix. And that’s where we are today with Mac OS X!

1. Pushing privacy

“A few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you’re not the customer. You’re the product. But at Apple, we believe a great customer experience shouldn’t come at the expense of your privacy.”

2. Weak in cloud

It’s been quoted in various news that Apple is rather “weak” in the cloud. But digging a little deeper, this appears to be a deliberate strategy, a bet against using customer data in ways those end users may grow to resent.

3. The bet against open worked

Recall that Apple has had a fairly closed ecosystem since the beginning. This has kept their AppStore much cleaner, and free of malware. Reference the terrible problems that still plague the Android Play Store, from lack of policing.

Open also works as an iron fist on UI & UX, enforcing a consistency across apps and developers. This is a clear win for consumers and end users, even if they don’t understand the hows, whys and wherefores.

4. Don’t monetize what you store in iCloud

Apple doesn’t directly monetize what is stored in iCloud. That means there’s no business imperative to make *use* of your data. They’re just storing it. This means they can also push encryption, a win for consumers, as it doesn’t bump heads with their business in any way.

5. iAd has real privacy limits

Apple does have a platform called iAd. But even that has in-built limitations.

“iAd sticks to the same privacy policy that applies to every other Apple product. It doesn’t get data from Health and HomeKit, Maps, Siri, iMessage, your call history, or any iCloud service like Contacts or Mail, and you can always just opt out altogether.”

It’s unclear if all of these moves will help Apple in the marketplace. It remains to be seen if consumers will choose technology based on privacy concerns and fears.

A highly trafficked website is a valuable asset indeed. For a services business it helps you build reputation and reach prospects.

Here’s how to get there.

1. Longevity

We’ve been around for a while, as you can see from a quick whois search below. I’ve owned the web property (aka domain name) iheavy.com and used it for the same purpose, since July 1999! Google notices this and ranks accordingly.

Until 2011 I wasn’t blogging much. I had a pagerank of 3 though. That’s attributable to two factors:

2. Authored a Technical Book (pagerank 3)

I authored a book for O’Reilly in 2001 called Oracle and Open Source. This bumped up our ranking from a flat 1 because we got backlinks from O’Reilly’s author blog, a strong authoritative signal to Google.

A conversion – for those out of the analytics loop – is when a user does something you want them to do. For an e-commerce site, they buy or start the process of buying. For a services website it could be visiting your about page, downloading a pdf or e-book, or signing up for a newsletter.

5. WordPress SEO plugin

WordPress is a great publishing platform. Among the many plugins to choose from, Yoast SEO is a very important one to include. It exposes all the hidden SEO fields and functions in a powerful way. Edit your short description, keywords & categories, and a lot more.

It also helps you frame and think about how your content is seen both by search engines, and searchers alike.

6. Keyword research

A little keyword research goes a long way. You might be a subject matter expert in a given field, but if you don’t know how your customers search, you can’t help them find you. Remember they don’t know what you do, so likely don’t know jargony terms or the vernacular your expertise uses within.

7. Watch your analytics (pagerank 4)

After about six months of regular blogging, and a few viral hits, our pagerank went up to 4. What was I doing? All of the above, plus watching analytics closely. I asked myself questions about visitors:

o Which pages do they like and why?
o What causes them to stick around?
o What causes bounce rate to go down?
o What causes them to convert?

I found that adding links to relevant content right in the text helped reduce bounce rate right away. This was a real discovery that I could apply everyday.

I also noticed that good content helped, but directly imploring readers to signup to the newsletter got regular conversions daily. Huh, that was a surprise since all along I had the signup form along the right column. Go figure.

8. Guest posting

Guest posting is great. It allows you to work with real publications who have paid editors. These folks with provide you with a more professional view, and that is great for your own writing and understanding your audience. The hardest thing to learn is how to write to a broad audience.

You’ll also of course get a backlink which is a major authority signal to the search engines. You might get paid a bit too, but your mileage may very.

From there I signed a syndication deal with Developer Zone. Since I have embedded links to content, that brings me regular traffic, even besides my profile, and the authoritative backlink.

Lately I’m working on some stuff for Gigaom and ACM’s Queue. Steady as she goes!

9. Get on the aggregators

Most likely your industry has some sort of aggregator site which will carry your RSS syndication feed. Get on those. That will drive regular traffic and RSS feedburner subscribers. We’re on Planet MySQL and it’s been great!

10. Patience, rinse and repeat

Easier said than done, I know. If you want this to happen overnight, you had better get onto the real world celebrity track. Otherwise work on your content, work on your voice, write clicky titles and keep your audience interested with solid content. And watch your traffic grow!

The title sounds vaguely fatalistic, the end of the world is nigh, that kind of thing. It turns out though that Auletta is a journalist having reported over the years a lot on old media. So when he says “as we know it” he’s speaking as much to old media as he is to the tech vanguard.

But what makes his book superb isn’t just his phenomenal journalistic skills, in digging up all the facts and serving up a fair and accurate presentation of things. I think it’s important that he’s not a cheerleader at all, and approaches the topic with a critical eye as much to old media who ignored many of the warning signs in early 2000′s as to google who he emphasizes has been hubristic, at times arrogant, and has struggled with issues of privacy and copyright as they’ve built their technology.

What makes this book even more important though is to step back and think of it as a case study in how the internet has become such a disruptive force. And in that light, google is a business which has rode that wave as much as it has defined it. Interestingly Google was not afraid to bring him to Mountain View to speak in their AtGoogleTalks series, and that video is now up on YouTube.

I’ve been looking for this book for a long time. Or maybe I should rephrase that. I was pondering this topic and had been looking for a book which covered it for a while so I was pleased to come across The Filter Bubble.

Digging into search engine optimization and analytics while building my own website, I was often confused by inconsistent Google search results. Realizing I was on a different computer, or I was logged into Google services I would logout to see the untainted results, the results everyone else was seeing. Or was I?

As Google+ personalization launched the topic of search really piqued my interest. Why had I been given different results at different times? The coverage on Gigaom, AllThingsD, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb cautioned that this could be the turning point for Google, in a bad way.

The filter

It’s true Google takes signals from many different sources. With the launch of Google+ they now incorporate additional social signals. As Facebook becomes the default dashboard for more and more internet users, the means of finding content is shifting from Search to Social. So Google is responding to this by making their overall service more social as well.

The impact though for users of the service could be confusion. Many users I’ve spoken to, working in tech or otherwise think the results they see on Google are unbiased and the same for each user. Google’s secret sauce has always been its algorithm that returned the best results. Now that social signals are mixed into the page rank brew, will users continue to value Google results?

A cause for concern

Pariser’s illustrates the difference in Google search today with great examples. After the gulf oil spill, he asked two friends to search for “BP”. One saw breaking news on the topic, the other got investment information about BP. Filter bubble, indeed.

Behavior Targeting, as it’s termed in the industry, is all about figuring out what you want before you ask. But sociologist Danah Boyd argued in a Web 2.0 Expo speech in 2009, that with all this personalization giving us exactly what we *want* that
“If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity”.
Even foundres, Sergey Brin and Larry Page in the early days apparently thought that this bias might turn out to be a problem

[quote_left]“We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers”.— Sergey Brin & Larry Page, Google[/quote_left]

Firms like Recorded Future promise to “unlock the predictive power of the web” and lesser known but formidable Acxiom which specializes in marketing and personalization, combing through mountains of data to figure out what coast you live on, how you vote, what you eat and drink, and almost what you’re going to do before you do it.

Pariser touches on everything in this book from present bias to meaningful threats, the priming effect, accessibility bias and warns of getting trapped in what he terms a “you loop” where you continue to see things framed and personalized by what you’ve viewed and reacted to before, ultimately narrowing your view, and limiting your exposure to new information.

Perhaps the biggest problem with these opaque transformations applied to your data is that they play judge and jury with no appeal; sometimes without your knowledge that you were in a courtroom being judged. Programmers write algorithms and code to perform these transformations, sorting people into groups. If they put people in a group that doesn’t match them they call it “overfitting”. In society we might call this some sort of stereotyping.

One chapter titled the Adderall Society, asks if this filter bubble isn’t part of a larger transformation that’s pushing our thinking towards the conservative and calculative, limiting creativity or foreign ideas that can break categories, and encouraging us to ignore or steer around serendipity.

The book bumps into a great spectrum of thinkers on this topic, from Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, to Amit Singhal an engineer on Google’s team, and John Battelle’s SearchBlog. He speaks to Chris Coyne – okcupid.com, David Shields on what he calls truthiness and former CIA consultant John Rendon who says “filter bubbles provide new ways of managing perceptions” and suggests the garden variety Thesaurus as a powerful tool that nudges debates with new language.

Be aware but don’t be paranoid

Although I think the book gives valuable insight, I was a little dismayed by the mood of paranoia in its title. With a subtitle like What the Internet is Hiding from You, it suggests a conspiracy or hidden agenda. Now obviously these large corps have a motive to make money, but I don’t think anyone is surprised at that. To some, Pariser’s views may appear somewhat left leaning but the issues raised in his book transcends political boundaries. They are matters that concern society at large.

In the end I think I’m probably more optimistic about these things. With a long view, society tends to work out these issues, through public pressure or simply buying differently. As Google is quick to remind us, we can easily choose an alternate search engine. In the future perhaps public pressure will push firms to provide more transparency about these filtering mechanisms allowing end users to manage their own filter settings.

I’ll leave you with a few ideas to chew on. Can code and algorithms curate properly? Should there be another button alongside the Like button such as “Important”?

Pariser quoted the folks at the New York Times: “We don’t let metrics dictate our assignments and play, because we believe readers come to us for our judgement, not the judgement of the crowd”. Indeed. But in the internet age, is that what they *buy* or *click*?